caulking a splash guard counter thing....

I dont know what this is called but i think it is a splash guard. Maybe
it doesnt have a name...who knows
My kitchen counter is flat of course.......and there is about a 3 inch
edge or lip on the back that is a right angle to the counter. Every
counter top i have ever seen in the world has this lip or edge. SOme
are formed to it and some are almost like a right angle butt joint. MY
uestion is i need to seal mine again and make it look good.
I think a guy could run a thin bead of caulking (white) down the entire
length of the back of the counter right on the joint to seal it.
Do they make some type of special tip for the caulking gun for this or
is there a special technique. I dont really want to blob some 3 inch
bead 10 feet down the back of my counter top :) I want it to look as
professional as possible.
ANyone know what im talking about??

The best way to get a clean caulk line is to use painters tap on both sides
of the joint. 1/4" away from the corner in each direction then caulk then
smooth with your finger to get a nice radius then remove the tape and don't
touch it after the tape is off. Done.
Rich

Read up on caulking techniques, and you'll find that it's pretty easy with
practice.
Clean the joint thoroughly and remove any caulking that's been there before, use
a good
caulk, and cut the tip of the tube so that a small bead comes out. The easiest
way I've
found to smooth out the caulking after it's applied is to use the "spit and
finger"
method. Get your finger wet with spit, and run it over the joint to smooth it
out. It
works better than any smoothing tool I've ever found.
The trick is to make sure the joint is perfectly clean before you start (using
alcohol is
a good idea) and keep the bead small.

You control the width of the bead by how much you cut off the tip of
the nozzle.
Aiui, even before spitting and smoothing, the technique is to push the
caulking tube or gun in the direction of the open nozzle.
The guy who owned this house before me drew the gun back as he
squeezed the trigger. The caulk came out in all different widths in
the same line. Looked terrible, and I had to remove most of it.
OTOH, I feel sympathy for him because one might just assume that the
caulking gun is pulled back, the same way a paint brush is pulled
back. Normally no one pushes a paint brush twoards the open bristles,
they pull it back. He must have thought caulk was done the same way.

really? So you push the caulk over the bead? Say you cut a 45 degree
tip, start and one end and push the gun over the bead as you go...is
this what you mean? Make sense. I suppose you have to tape both
surfaces and after you lay the smooshed bead witht the
push.............pull the tape up and off before the caulk
dries....smooth the bead with the spit finger and whola?
sound right.....?
Id better practice a few runs somewhere first :)

I don't cut at 45 degrees. I cut at 90, or zero, whatever makes
sense.
But you didn't quote what I said. I started with "aiui". I'm ready
for counter-comments.

By cutting straight across, the bottom side of the nozzle smooths the
bead that was just laid down. I think the nozzle goes just the right
depth into the corner. That is the further down the nozzle is cut
off, the wider the nozzle stub and the wider the bead, and the further
the nozzle stub sits away from the bottom of the corner.
Maybe this would be true at 45^ also, but the overhanging nozzle
would, I think, make it harder to see what was going on.
I moved here 22 years ago, and I don't remember what I thought before
then (I think I thought the same as I do now) but it seemed to me that
the most likely reason for the previous owner of this house's bad
caulking was that he pulled the gun towards him. If he pulled too
fast, the bead got thin. When he tried to slow down to make up for
that, he pumped out too much bead and it was too thick and sometimes
s-shaped, almost like a sine wave. (And he did this on the brick too,
where it was very hard to removed the caulk. In fact I never got it
all. He caulked everything whether it needed it or not, because he
was from Louisiana and he was cold in Baltimore.)

I don't understand the talk about tape. If the tape goes down first,
how can you lift it off without taking up the caullk?
I never tape, but if someone explains this to me, maybe I will.

You mean, voila. It's French. Pronounced wahLAH. Like the "oi" in
croissant. I only bring this up because I see it misspelled 3 out of
4 times on the net.

I think when I do it right, when I squeeze about the right amount, I
don't have to smooth it at all. But it's not like I caulk every day.
Or that I redo things just to see how they come out with different
techniques.

Practice is definitely good. I have occasionally let it dry and
ripped it out, but not everything comes out in one chunk and I had to
scrape excess off.
If I'm right, this should be pretty well known. AFAICT there is only
forwards and back, and if one is better, a lot of people should be
ready to say so. (Although there have been a couple things I do right
and afaict, everyone else does wrong. Not necessarily about home
repair. I wish I could remember one of them.)
Remove NOPSAM to email me. Please let
me know if you have posted also.

mm is correct, The correct method is to push a caulk gun, not pull it.
By using masking tape as a border, as previously mentioned, is also
another good idea, provided you haven't laid a ton of caulk into the
joint/seam. Otherwise, as you pull the tape right after caulking, you
will not get a clean, or proper seam.
I've seen recently rolls of Silicone Caulk Tape sold in Stores like Home
Depot, and Lowes, which comes in different widths, is made for caulking
around bath tubs, and the backing is peeled off, and the tape applied.
Sounds like a good idea, but I have never used the product to comment on
how well it works. Mark

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